Only 5.1% of day cares in Kobe ‘ready to accept’ kids with foreign roots: survey

8 comments

1. They are saying only 5% can handle children that don’t speak Japanese which is understandable.

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   No, Japan doesn’t need to have all public schools cater to multiple languages.

2. This article is extremely stupid in every way. The article itself, the survey, and the people surveyed.

   If a child is born or raised in Japan it would be fair to assume they speak Japanese, and if they don’t, children learn languages very quickly so it would take no time at all for them to pick up the language in the first place.

   As for catering to religion/culture, I find that extremely lazy from the daycares itself. Would they not cater to kids with allergies to specific foods? It smells like blatant discrimination to me.

   I’m Bangladeshi, born and raised in Kagoshima, and my parents had no issues finding me a daycare/nursery/kindergarten. My daycares and schools even specifically served me (the only kid from a muslim family in the schools/ daycares) food that didn’t have pork in it, the same way they accomodated to kids with allergies. Plenty of daycares here accomodate foreign children and have no issues doing so. Communication with parents might be of concern but it really isn’t hard and it’s not like parents that are in or planning to be in Japan in the long term and even sending their kids to local daycares aren’t willing to learn Japanese, or at least I hope so.

   The only thing I got from this is that I’m never raising a child in Kobe.

3. “foreign roots”

   Yeah, I’ve seen this shit first hand. Friend mine has two kids and tried putting her two girls through day-care. She had a ton of questions like this from the staff trying to persuade her how difficult it would be for the kids being put into that environment because you know…’gaikoku’

   Except,

   a) Her husband is Japanese

   b) the kids were born in Japan

   c) She passed N1 and has lived in Japan for 5 years. She is practically fluent.

   The kids are not the issue, they will pick up the language in no time – its entirely down to Japanese adults being racist pieces of shit towards the parents.

4. The headline is significantly more alarming than the article itself.

5. I love how this sub in its perpetual rush to be offended and scream WACIST!!!!!! at the top of their lungs just glossed right by the first sentence of the article without understanding it:

   “Though as many as 61.2% of the day cares in this west Japan port city have children with foreign roots, only 5.1% are “ready to accept” them, an industry organization survey has revealed.”

6. eh? I went to a yochien in Kobe after moving from Indonesia and they were pretty chill. Not sure if this article is accurate.

7. Foreign roots? Or that some part of the child’s dna is foreign? Either way, this makes no sense.

8. My two cents as a father of a kindergartener (not daycare, but close) in Kobe: My 4-year-old is in a 24-student class. Of those, 9 have “foreign roots” where either one or both parents are from another country (Philippines, Peru, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, etc.), and many are recent arrivals. As far as I can tell, the school makes no special effort to accommodate the kids who arrive not speaking Japanese. But sure enough, after a year or so they all do.

   Communications with the parents are probably the tougher part. But what appears to be happening is the school just uses a group Line account, and the people who can’t read Japanese cut and paste everything into a translation app. I haven’t heard of any disasters yet.